Machine Gun Preacher is too much in awe of its complex hero, the real life aid
worker and vigilante Sam Childers.

Gerard Butler is an actor for whom I have a great deal of affection, despite being consistently appalled by the films in which he appears and particularly by his work in them. There’s something about his weaponised Gruffalo schtick that’s undeniably appealing, but it’s yet to be successfully exploited on screen – and Machine Gun Preacher is yet another failed attempt to do just that.

The title might conjure up images of Butler in a cassock and surplice, straddling the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and mowing down the Occupy London protest camp with a Gatling gun; but in actual fact, Machine Gun Preacher is the kind of film marketing departments call “an inspirational true story”. Butler plays Sam Childers, a hard-drinking, drug-abusing biker thug from Minnesota who ‘got religion’ in the late 1990s and flew out to East Africa on a charity mission. While there, he became an unsettling mix of aid worker and vigilante: half on fire for Jesus, half setting bad guys on fire for Jesus.

We first meet Childers (Butler) when he’s released from prison. During his time behind bars, his wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) has become a Christian – and not just any Christian, but a hand-wavin’, foot-stompin’ Southern evangelical. She encourages Childers to come to church with her. He does, reluctantly, yet a twinge of conscience makes him stand for prayer. Lo, he gets the bug, and in the weeks that follow, Christianity takes over his life. Lynn, can only look on with the weary resignation of a woman who once suggested it might be nice if her husband took the kids to the model railway shop, and is now watching him remove the last of the furniture from the spare room to make space for a fourth layout.

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Childers is inspired by a missionary to go to Uganda, where he builds homes for families displaced by a guerrilla fighting force called the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by the despot Joseph Kony. Once there, he's inspired to move north into Sudan, where he builds an orphanage and leads armed raids against the LRA, in an attempt to rescue the children the group is trafficking into armed conflict and sex slavery. It’s these raids that earn Childers his macho nickname, and which, alongside his struggle to be a good husband and father back home, make up the meat of the movie.

If you’re wondering why this role has been entrusted to the star of such plutonium-grade twaddle as The Ugly Truth and P.S. I Love You, note that Butler does not only play the lead in Machine Gun Preacher but he's also its executive producer: clearly, since nobody else was willing to give him a shot at the big time, he’s decided to give one to himself. Unfortunately it hasn’t paid off, because while his film is clearly in awe of Childers as a person, it clearly can't make hide nor hair of him as a character.

Butler’s face is not, shall we say, the most complex piece of dramatic apparatus to have ever graced a cinema screen. It can certainly do emotions (when Butler’s face does an emotion, you’re seldom in doubt of which emotion it’s doing) but it’s also incapable of processing more than one at a time. As a result, Childers' spiritual and violent sides never seem to conflict with each other – and surely it's that conflict that makes him worth a film in the first place.

The screenplay, by Jason Keller, falls into a similar trap by assuming that audiences will accept everything Childers does simply because it’s prefaced with a “based on a true story” caption. But while the film might be biographically accurate, it isn’t artistically satisfying: real people are inexplicable in a way that characters in films shouldn’t be, and consequently, he feels half-finished.

Mark Forster’s direction is just as enjoyably gravelly as it was in The Kite Runner and Quantum Of Solace, and he acquits himself here a lot better than Butler does, as either a leading man or an executive producer. Not to worry: Butler is currently producing two more films, and has given himself the main role in each. There’s time for him to justify my affection yet.